Sister #3 objects to me calling my mother an atheist, insisting she was religious in her fashion or in Sister 3’s words “spiritual.”
Now it’s true that of her five children, one is an Eastern spiritual devotee, one is Unitarian, two are tribal, High Holiday Jews (one with strong leanings toward petitionary prayer, largely focused on her children getting married) and I am a religious mutt-- a Perennialist of sorts, sharing the common yearning, expressed in many religions, to experience the divine: a meditator, member of a social-justice based synagogue, student, at different times, of the Torah, the Gospels, the Principal Upanishads, Thomas a Kempis, Plato, Teresa of Avila, Simone Weil and Gurdjieff, among others.
How did this happen to the offspring of committed atheists??
The best I can say is that my mother had a religious temperament. She was capable of fervor, ecstasy and rapture; Sufis, revivalists, Southern Baptists and Elvis fans had nothing on her. But her spiritual enthusiasm always homed toward Beauty (and, of course, her grandchildren). She’d weep, libretto on her lap, as Tosca or Boehme blared from the stereo. She'd swoon on viewing Michaelangelo’s Pieta, knees buckling and holding up the line. She'd pour over literary fiction like a dissident over samizdat. You could not pry her from her seat 10 minutes after the curtain fell on the Stuttgart dancing Romeo and Juliet; she was still in a trance.
As I teenager I found this mortifying as, at the time, the slightest hint of passion in my parents seemed just so, well. . . yuck, to use a technical term. But I now think it was my mother’s way of straining beyond everydayness to touch the sacred, though she would never have used that word. Her heightened sensitivity and deep attunement to high art was a form of worship. And I think we all caught this to a greater or lesser extent.
Sister 3, point well taken.
So, Mom, you old atheist, may you be shocked to find that there's not "nothing" after death. May there actually be a divine realm in which you now dwell. May it ring out with Beethoven, Bach and the Romantics. And may you have the option of switching to Billie Holiday when the spirit moves you or to Sinatra when it's time to get back your groove.